IBM making SOA push for mainframes

08.05.2006
Recognizing a role for its big-iron boxes in contemporary SOA environments, IBM on Monday is unveiling tools and initiatives intended to give its mainframe more prominence in SOA.

The effort aims to help users handle the proliferation of business processes and applications that the company says is turning its System z mainframe into a global hub of Internet-based computing. The company expects the SOA trend to prompt a doubling of the number of transactions on mainframes before 2010.

"We are seeing an increase in the workloads coming back on the mainframe. The IT world tends to ebb and flow a bit," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive at IBM's Software Group, at an analyst event in New York City last week.

"The labor cost issue is the single biggest driver moving more workloads back to the mainframe," Mills said.

With IBM's plan, users can consolidate processing on a mainframe instead of spreading it on many distributed servers, said Hayden Lindsey, IBM Distinguished Engineer at the Rational Software group.

"Customers are seeing this and in fact they're finding it more cost-effective to consolidate a lot of their workload onto many fewer z machines than hundreds or thousands of distributed machines," Shelley said.